Billions of kilometers from Earth, beyond Neptune’s orbit, lies perhaps the most forbidding part of our solar system, a vast realm so cold and dark it sends a shiver of dread through even the most daring space explorers.

There, the Sun, so cheerful and warm here on Earth, appears merely as the brightest star in the night sky, and it’s so cold that Pluto’s atmosphere, the only one of nine planets orbiting so far from the Sun, remains frozen to the ground most of the time. A spacecraft, be it from Earth or alien origins, exploring the outer edges of our solar system might spend a lot of time wandering in seemingly empty space, barely seeing anything but stars and the occasional passing ice mountain.

Indeed, for most of the last century, astronomers thought there was little to see out there, just a small icy planet Pluto and its odd moon Charon. Perhaps it was better to move on and head towards a distant star.

But wait, maybe the outer solar system isn’t so dull after all. Recently, astronomers have discovered that the frontier beyond Neptune, far from being empty, might actually be teeming with thousands of objects. This is being revealed to us by New Horizons, the same probe that took us to Pluto in July of 2015.

We’ll first get acquainted with what we know today about what lies beyond Neptune and then we’ll try to grasp the revolutionary scope of the new discoveries. What do you say, guys? Are you leaving, or will you keep watching?

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